Posts Tagged ‘Dan Auerbach’
The Black Keys “Brothers” Album Review
With uber-producer Danger Mouse on board for 2008’s Attack & Release, The Black Keys made one of the best albums of that year – and probably in recent memory. The Black Keys were making good music before Danger Mouse entered the fold, but he added another dimension to the band’s traditional, straight-up blues rock formula by incorporating psychedelic touches and little instrumentation flairs here and there. Basically, he fleshed out their sound and made it a little more dynamic.
On Brothers, however, Danger Mouse only manned the production board for one song, the album’s first single “Tighten Up” – leaving the Keys, Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney, to handle the rest of the load themselves. So right off the bat, the first question in my mind was whether they’d be able to live up to the bar they set with their last album.
To my delight, Danger Mouse was not the vital ingredient to the Keys’ reinvented sound. The guys do a swell job on their own again, and Brothers can confidently stand toe-to-toe against anything in the group’s catalog.
The Black Keys released one of my favorite albums of 2008, Attack & Release. Produced by Danger Mouse, it featured a noticeable progression of the band’s sound and the songs were catchy as hell – just a bunch of really tasty southern psychedelic riffs and anguished crooning.
But after the record came out, the two band members started dabbling in all sorts of side projects like their rap-rock project Blakroc, Dan Auerbach’s solo album, and Patrick Carney’s band Drummer. It seemed like it would be a long time before we heard them together again in The Black Keys.
Thankfully, that’s not the case. And we will actually get to hear new Black Keys music much sooner than I ever anticipated. How soon? Well the band announced that their sixth album, Brothers, will be released on May 18th.
This time, however, Danger Mouse is only producing one track, “Tighten Up.” Carney and Auerbach will be handling most of the other production work themselves. So it will be interesting to see whether they can carry over the same magic from Attack & Release without a heavy Danger Mouse influence. Personally, I think they can.
Perhaps the coolest bit of news about this new album is that there will be a cover of Jerry Butler’s “Never Give You Up” (as opposed to Rick Astley’s more famous “Never Gonna Give You Up”, although a cover of that would be awesome as well.)
They chose a great album cover too:
Full track list after the jump.